osyolyc354

By

When Voltaire stated that "every person is guilty of all the good he didn't do," he could very well have had someone like Amanda Knox in mind. After the rape and murder of her fellow lodger Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, on the night of Nov. 1, 2007—the 21-year-old British exchange student's throat had been cut—the pretty young American woman from Seattle, in Italy to study at a local university,Doudoune Moncler, showed too little concern, or so felt the Italian police when they questioned her. Ms. Knox, they said, seemed "bizarrely unemotional" in the aftermath of such a terrible crime.

She soon became the prime suspect, along with her Italian boyfriend and, eventually,nike air jordan, another man, a drifter named Rudy Guede, who had met Meredith Kercher and had visited the house where she lived. After an investigation that turned up circumstantial evidence, Ms. Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, her boyfriend, were accused and convicted of the crime; she was sentenced to 26 years in prison, he to 25. (Mr. Guede was tried and convicted separately.) Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito spent four years in prison during the trial and appeal process; their convictions were overturned on Oct. 3, 2011.

In "A Death in Italy," John Follain, an investigative reporter,doudoune moncler homme, gives a riveting account of the whole affair,Moncler, from the murder and trial to the electrifying appeals-court decision. Along the way, he offers a vivid portrait of the woman at the center of it all. He shows, among much else, that a series of missteps, omissions and blunders brought Ms. Knox down. Many of them came from investigators and prosecutors,air jordan pas cher, but more than a few were of her own doing.

To those who met Ms. Knox socially or who shared the Perugia house with her, she appeared confident, naïve, slightly dramatic and eccentric. She had eight ear piercings and was known to break into song at odd moments or to interrupt a party by assuming yoga positions. She and Meredith Kercher were friendly initially,doudoune moncler pas cher, but the British student began to cool toward the American, not least because Ms. Knox had a habit of leaving a sexual toy and condoms in a transparent bag in the bathroom.

Ms. Knox was tomboyish, smoked pot, liked Harry Potter books and loved the Beatles. She would confide to her prison diary: "I want to get another tattoo—the words 'Let it be.' " An acquaintance said that she "lacked common sense," and that was surely the case when Ms. Knox muttered,air jordan femme, at the forensic office the day after the murder: "The worse thing about all this is that if I'd been home last night it could have happened to me."

Her boyfriend, Mr. Sollecito, a wealthy,air jordan, spoiled student from Bari, Italy, was as casual about the murder as Ms. Knox when they were first questioned. They were photographed hugging and kissing on the very morning that Kercher's body was discovered. They joked with each other and made comic faces at interviews.

The crime against Kercher was savage—there were 23 wounds on the victim—but the story became even bigger when lurid tales surfaced of drug-fueled orgies in the students' house. It was revealed that Ms. Knox had had several lovers within weeks of her arrival in Italy—she had been forced to list all of them when the police declared, falsely, that she was HIV-positive. On her Facebook page, she once wrote: "A lot of my friends say I'm a hippy, but I am thinking I am just weird. I don't get embarrassed and therefore have very few social inhibitions. . . . The bigger and scarier the roller coaster the better."

Attention from the first centered on the more sensationalistic aspects of the crime, not excluding the presence of two black men, the innocent bar owner Patrick Lumumba (whom Ms. Knox initially accused of having been involved) and Mr. Guede, a 21-year-old Ivory Coast native raised in Perugia. Mr. Guede's DNA was found on Kercher's vaginal swab, on the left sleeve of her blood-soaked sweatshirt and elsewhere at the crime scene. Of the 108 fingerprints, handprints and footprints taken by police, one alone was Ms. Knox's, the print of her right index finger on a water glass in the kitchen. But early in the case, prosecutor Guiliano Mignini had ruled out Mr. Guede as a suspect and concentrated on Ms. Knox and her boyfriend instead. When the world press landed, a smiling Mr. Mignini strolled the cobbled streets of Perugia, open to any and all interviews.

But of course it was Ms. Knox who drew the major attention. Was she a victim or a villain? Earlier accounts of the case have tried out both possibilities. Nina Burleigh's "The Fatal Gift of Beauty" (2011) is sympathetic to Ms. Knox and often overdone ("It was a Thursday night, and All Souls' Night, when the dead mingle with the living . . ." ). Barbie Latza Nadeau's "Angel Face" (2010)—a Daily Beast "Beast Book"—is filled with extravagant hypotheses and an unsubtle hostility to Ms. Knox. By contrast, Mr. Follain's book, based on hundreds of interviews and enriched by his unique access to the complete case files, is remarkably objective and fair-minded to all parties involved.

"I didn't kill. I didn't rape. I didn't steal," Ms. Knox told the jury at her last court appearance. It seems clear from "A Death in Italy" that she was telling the truth. She did herself no good with her obnoxious behavior, but a botched crime scene didn't help either. Crucial evidence was placed in unsterilized bags and haphazardly examined, contaminating evidence and compromising DNA.

Grandstanding was a commonplace all through the case, not only by the amateur postal police who were the first responders but also by the carabinieri and national police force, all of whom were elbowing each other for access and authority. The court system in Italy seems as addled and incompetent as the competing prosecutors seem ferocious and bumbling.

Ms. Knox had her advocates—her two defense attorneys, in Mr. Follain's account,moncler, are both impressive—but in custody, in the courts and in prison she was lied to, bullied, propositioned, exploited and abused. If people are indeed guilty for the good they did not do,moncler doudoune, from all one can see, very few in Perugia connected to this trial were innocent.

Mr. Theroux is the author of "Estonia: A Ramble Through the Periphery."

A version of this article appeared August 23, 2012, on page A11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Victim, Or a Villain?.